On the Conservation of Loneliness

My home is a damp place, where the fiery crowns of streetlamps beckon wanderers such as myself through our bone chilling mists, and the solemn drip of the day to day seems to erode us as the broken cobblestone beneath each dreary step we have remaining. The hollow cacophony of distant laughs among shut in houses accompanied a lonely stroll of mine on such an evening four weeks ago. My study is often more of a suffocation chamber than a creative space, with its walls acting as more of a prison sentencing me to the drudgery of work that I would otherwise enjoy were it not for the pressure to produce it for a better shot at food and rent. The irony of going about tasks in an oppressive environment to eventually earn enough wages to sustain such an existence within it, is not lost on me in the slightest. So these walks; as cold, heavy, and haunting as they can be; offer reprieve from the paralyzing fear of being unable to carry my weight financially, or the gripping inadequacy I feel to see the halting progress of my work itself. At least with each step away from my study I feel a measurable displacement along a resistive path, and can see a change in my surroundings until of course hunger or tiredness sets in, and the sum of my efforts brings me once again to this prison of mine.



I shuffled along one of the parks that I enjoy that night, the reflections spattered by lights on the riverside hugging the left of my path are a sight to behold, and when accompanied by the dull rush of the beating river, it’s easy to lose ones way; to walk through yet another memory. I held my coat tighter to myself as the smell of the cold flared up, and the push of wind seeped into the fibres of my being. It’s always nice to stop and appreciate the view, but it honestly is weather permitting most nights. This night was a bit different however, an inexplicable calm seemed to make each step a forceful thud against the soft ground, and perhaps even the sparkle from the water somehow took on an unhealthy radiance. They’re not all bad you know, these memories. I thought about an old friend as I leaned against a familiar tree, then let out a small chuckle. I really miss all of my friends, and thinking of one sends a cascade of loneliness far longer than the list of faces I should like to see again. In any case, that night was strange and therefore no real exception to what one might expect these past few months, but perhaps to the ignorant, forces of greater strangeness often go undetected if not first ambushed with hostility. That’s not what this discovery felt like though, when my hand trailed down the living texture of the tree, I did not expect to hear the soft flick of parchment to carve a small slit on my index. I winced.



“Where did you come from?” I laughed aloud to the source of my surprise. A little black Book sat in a crevice of the tree, a shallow hole where I could only remember a branch to be otherwise. This thing must be old. The Book was a collection of pages wrapped in a soft leather binding that was still held together remarkably well despite what looked like years of wear on its thick covers. It weighed more than I expected a book with a face not very much larger than the span of my hand to. A hunger to see more of this captivated me, to open its pages and listen to whatever history it held, so I took my burning curiosity to one of the better lit park benches to have a look at its yellowed insides. Only that’s where the night took a turn. As I sat down a pressing uneasiness pulled my vision into only what was in front of me, the darkness of my periphery becoming a wavelike void of undetermined shadows writhing about me in a cold embrace. I heard the turning of the pages, but I don’t recall ever seeing their contents. In fact, I don’t recall anything beyond the absurd sight of what happened immediately after.



I was in my room, the sun cascading down the walls onto the solid wood of my desk to my right. I jumped with an audible start, whipping the small book still in my hands against the ceiling, and falling over the chair haphazardly placed behind me as I recoiled. I fell onto the floor and scrambled to my bare feet as fast as my brain could register what was happening, already attempting to sort that which perhaps cannot be sorted. I took a few moments of pause. I’m not an untidy person, I might say melodramatic things like “my study is a dungeon,” but I still try to keep the place in relative order given the circumstances that my mind is healthy enough to balance all that. This place was a disaster; papers were strewn around the floor, my bed sheets were stripped from their place and placed over the light which gave a rather unsettling flicker as I surveyed the mess, and markings that appear to have started on my chalkboard covered the walls in large geometric patterns whose meaning I still can’t discern besides the gnawing feeling the seemed to evoke in the pit of my stomach. I stood there in a sort of shock for a few minutes before loudly exclaiming “ALL RIGHT, TIME FOR BREAKFAST I GUESS.” I rushed out of the room as fast as I could after that, being followed by the ever present notion that each symbol on my wall moved and whispered only to the upright hairs on the back of my neck.



Hours later I uncertainly stuck my head through the door again, its hinges letting out a moan that prompted me to slam the door even faster than before. Easy there, everyone has bad dreams. I took a deep breath and with some confidence mustered, I stepped back into prison. The heaviness of the air remained with the busy drawings that are difficult to place into words, and the breeze past my window still sounded like an unnaturally soft rhythmic breath. I looked at the Book. There’s something about its very existence that seems to command its respect and regard, a piece so modest, yet so incomprehensibly addictive that my hands were about its spine before I could even consider otherwise. Nothing prompted me to open it again, I still had a fear of the previous night’s twelve-hour memory blackout so I continued to stand there amidst the mess. I kicked at some paper which had similar markings in a sort of putrid smelling ink that overwhelms the senses when one gets too close, and that’s when I noticed the first one. One hundred dollars on the floor, I moved aside more paper. I’m not smart enough to save that much, but if I were, leaving it on the ground is the only sensible explanation as to how it hasn’t been spent. Just as I thought that this one curiosity started to have a kind of logic behind it, my other foot slipped more of the marked paper. As I leaned up I saw what happened, beneath the papers, dozens of these bills were turning up. I started a pile of the cash that seemed to spawn from the very stagnating air itself, and in complete silent shock, uncovered two-hundred of these.



The feelings of confusion were drowned out by the thunder of blood in my ears, and panicked fury to fit these events into a reasonable explanation. Unfortunately my mind is not even fit to cover my work, much less the indescribable, so I continued to stoop and collect money which I did not earn through the fruits of any labour. After tapping the stack a few times and ordering it well, I decided to leave for the bank to pay off some debt from more undeserved money loaned to me, and sort out immediate finances. I departed so quickly that I didn’t bother to consider having guilt, to question its origins, or to learn anything more. This is an escape, and not nearly as morbid as considerations I’ve sought before. I’m running from a monster in my prison and I can free myself from if I just take care of the early essentials. It’s been four weeks.



I must confess, how I came into this sum was met with some distrust when I walked into the clinical professionalism of the closest bank to me. Disbelief marked the teller’s face almost as prominently as the symbols that burned my eyelids whenever I blinked. That was at first, but with each bureaucratic layer of the process of getting most of this money to where it could best help the immediate needs of my sister and I, the act of stowing away this undeserved income became easier. There were points where I don’t recall exchanging more than a few words to give what should have been considered an unsatisfactory explanation. I felt as though it wasn’t even my voice to confidently stride around the hoops that should have been set before me, meeting each worried look with a passive shrug. “Local trading” was my only untrue explanation for how I came to it, and that seemed to be oddly satisfactory enough for even the most initially skeptical. The act of lying made me flinch, but I was feeling rather unlike myself in those moments so it was an easy thing to blurt out. My ears stopped ringing from the excitement of all this when the last of my immediate payments were secured. I walked home to a setting sun with an arm full of groceries that I would usually bar from myself for their price.



It has been four weeks and each day the lessening burden of my finances allowed me to accomplish so much more. I was able to focus into a frenzy of productivity, burning through the toughest of work at home as if it was talking to an old friend, or standing by my sunny window which illuminates my home, my room. The last four nights have not been like that however. The Book is still here but all traces of the symbols drawn remain only as fragments in my mind. What’s more is that I’ve been having an insomnia that I can’t seem to work past; each night I wake to see a hulking figure peer out from my closet, beckoning me in a tongue I shouldn’t understand. It has hungry eyes with a paralyzing gaze that pushes down on my chest until I burst up to an empty room, thrashing and screaming to the ceiling. I feel like I’ve constantly been turning corners to see shadows dart away as dark moving edges of a tunnel with only a pinprick of light at the end. The dread and the fear, like those of my former circumstances, hold me alert at night, disallowing me to drift off to the sounds of a soft breathing rising and falling in a slower phase than my own. I find myself staring at messages in my room. Pathetic. Insignificant. Worthless. Inadequate. It marks in my writing the chalkboard in place of my usual work, and accomplishing anything has been impossible since then. It makes me wonder, to whom now am I indebted? Should I open it again?



I’m beginning to understand that the chilling dampness, the loneliness, is not something I can buy away. The pressure, weight, and fear associated with everything before the Book is still here. I still walk to the tree with this creeping darkness never releasing its grip from me; perhaps evidence enough on its own that I don’t deserve to be happy.